The State on Wednesday 8,830 new cases of COVID-19, a jump by 1,476 cases than the previous day, to take the cumulative case burden to 1,96,106 cases.
The State did an additional 14,306 tests than it did on Tuesday, testing a record number of 63,682 samples in the last 24 hours. Nearly 75% of these are rapid antigen tests.
Despite the incentive of test-on-demand offered by the government, testing remains quite low in the private sector, for various reasons.
However, even after doing higher number of tests, the test positivity rate remained at 13%, indicating the intensity of disease transmission in the community, so that more tests would just pick up more cases.
The number of recoveries reported on the day is 3,536, the highest recorded in a single day so far. With the cumulative recoveries reported till date being 1,28,224, the number of active cases now is 67,061. Of these, 438 patients are critically ill and being treated in ICUs, while another 92 have been put on ventilator support.
The cumulative death toll in the State rose to 742 by adding 23 more deaths which occurred between September 11 and 27 to the official list. Palakkad accounted for eight of these deaths, Thiruvananthapuram six, Alappuzha three, Malappuram two and one each in Kassaragod, Ernakulam, Kottayam and Pathanamthitta.
Over 97% of the new cases reported — 8,608 out of the 8,830 new cases — are locally acquired infections, which include 784 cases wherein the source of infection remains unknown. It also includes infections reported in 123 health-care workers, majority of the cases being in Kannur (33) and Thiruvananthapuram (32).
